You get a better idea why he, as well as his vastly more experienced rivals, are right in moving towards the centre when you check out the change in the countryside. In the oversized slum-village of Afzalgarh which boasts more than 50 tractors, four hours per day of power supply but three schools and a madarsa, we met three very young girls carrying bags of firewood — actually scrapings from the nearby saw-mill — larger than their tiny frames. Don’t ask them exactly how old they are. To me, they looked about the age of the three loveliest little creatures you see in the Hutch ad describing their dog in the classroom briefly, less briefly and even less briefly. Zeba, Aamna and Mantazar (who tells us she prefers to be addressed by her pet name, Chand), are cousins. Their fathers are tailors. They help their mothers in the kitchen, wash clothes and fetch water and firewood. But they all go to school — a private school, such as it may be in Afzalgarh. In the evenings, though, they also go to the madarsa. Your favourite subjects: English, Hindi, Urdu and, surprise of surprises, ganit (maths). A half hour spent with the three cousins of Afzalgarh as they put their loads down and chat away, would cure you of many misconceptions, stereotypes, old notions of Uttar Pradesh, of rural India, of Muslims, or Muslim women.

If you want to see change, come to Uttar Pradesh. Until the other day, if I said so, you’d ask me to go get my head examined. And I would perhaps have done so. But not now. There is change, and while it may take some time reflecting fully in election results, it is acquiring a momentum that will redefine our political landscape in a way that we move away from the politics of grievance to the politics of aspiration.

... contd.